Judge releases voting machines report

October 18, 2008 3:25:57 PM PDT

Eyewitness News

TRENTON --

A new report says New Jersey's electronic voting machines can be hacked into in as little as seven minutes and manipulated to alter votes or fix elections.The report is by Professor Andrew Appel of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

A judge ordered Appel's findings to be made public yesterday as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the Coalition for Peace Action and others who want New Jersey to scrap its 10,000 electronic voting machines and return to paper balloting.

Appel says in the report that the state's most often-used touch-screen voter machines contain design flaws that could allow votes to go uncounted or be manipulated.